Maybe the experts in this group would like to give their thoughts about
the why of this apparently/seemingly/obviously ridiculous(?) regression?

Robert
--
Robert AH Prins
robert(a)prino(d)org
[The conventional wisdom is that COBOL programs are all I/O bound, so
the speed of the object code is not a big deal. There are plenty of
other compilers that can optimize this kind of stuff. -John]